The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, launched by Dublin City Council in 1996, is the world's richest literary award for a single title, with a prize of €100,000, and is open to fiction published both in English and in other languages and translated into English. In the event of a win by a book in translation, the prize is split 75:25 in the author's favour.

Nominations are made by libraries around the world from books first published in English in the calendar year two years before the year of the award. The longlist, which features all nominated titles, usually consists of well over 100 books and is announced in the November of the year before the award. A panel of figures from the book world selects a shortlist of six to ten titles in April and then a winner in June.

Given the huge number of books that meet the selection criteria, it is not surprising that the range of winners has been extremely diverse, with many being books that had received relatively little attention on publication. Few winners have won other major awards, although Edward Jones' The Known World had previously won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the prestigious American prize, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses also won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Additionally, both Herta Müller and Orhan Pamuk have gone on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The prize has certainly given a huge boost to the international profile of most of its winners. Since nominations are made by the library sector, winning books tend not to be controversial in their subject matter, with the notable exception of Michel Houellebecq's Atomised, whose graphic sexual descriptions divided critics and readers. There has also been some criticism in the past for the dominance of European and North American authors, with 2014 winner Colombia Juan Gabriel Vásquez from only the second exception after Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun.

The 2016 winner was Akhil Sharma for Family Life. The judges were authors Meaghan Delahunt, Carlo Gébler, Ian Sansom and Juan Pablo Villalobos and translator Iglika Vassileva.

Shortlisted for the 2016 International DUBLIN Literary Award and the 2015 FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Award. With masterful prose that is at once subtle and penetrating, Mukasonga captures a society...